John Jay cites an example of The March of Folly from chemist Derek Lowe:
I’ve worked where the safety culture was limited to occasional warnings not to blow yourself up, and I’ve worked under intrusive, no-sparrow-shall-fall regimes. Neither of those, as far as I could see, kept me safer than the other. The problem is, if you’re going to aggressively document every possible incident and near miss, to be entered into the massive database and discussed in detail at the mandatory regular safety meetings (attendance taken and computed into the year-end bonus formula) … well, people are going to sit on most of the ones that they think that they can get away with. The harder you work to log every lapse, the more of them you’ll miss.
He then cites a scary example before making his point:
So what we have here is failure to communicate. What we also have here is a breakdown in the rule of law caused by too many rules. Before I went to the USSR, I probably would have thought that adding rules to safety regulations would make things safer, because I was acculturated to obey rules, and also predisposed to believe that most rules were instituted with good reason.However, in the USSR, even people I considered to be decent and good, and — if they were given a chance to live in America — law abiding, regularly talked about breaking laws to me in the USSR. Not just talk — they used to break them, and quite frankly help me break them as well.
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But let’s not kid ourselves with our Anglosphere talk — we in the English speaking world can destroy the unique legacy our culture has bequeathed us by burying individual initiative and the entrepreneurial spirit in a morass of laws. Indeed, much of the West, even Britain by all appearances, is already close to that point.